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Soapstone Signs by Jeff Pinkney and Darlene Gait (Illustrator)

Soapstone
Signs, from the Orca Echoes series, is one of our book club
books this year.

I
predict it will be a favourite.

It
is so beautifully written it enchanted me. Pinkney's background in poetry is
obvious. I don't usually feel this way about about a chapter book, but
honestly, Pinkney's use of language is so lyrical I was forced to stop and
reread sections.

The
book tells the story of a young cree boy who lives in the James Bay area. Every
spring his family is visited by a master carver, Lindy, who sells his carvings
at their lodge.

"Lindy has a place he likes to sit by the
riverbank. I like to sit with him and watch him carve. Sometimes he hands me
what he has been working on. I look and then hand it back without saying a
word. Really, that is saying a lot."

This
spring, Lindy gives the boy four pieces of soapstone to carve. The boy wants to
know what to carve and is told, "You ask the stone, ... Whatever it is
going to be, it is already there." The
conversation continues, and the boy learns that you have to wait for a sign,
and that "a sign can be anyway that the world gives you a message. Signs
come to you when your thoughts mix with your senses."

The
boy's first sign comes in a dream and he carves a polar bear. Then we
follow him through the ensuing year as he finds signs in many different
places. In the summer he travels by canoe with his mother on a berry picking
expedition. In the fall he joins the hunters shooting geese for the first time.
Come winter there is hockey and life in a frozen world.

The
boy's encounter with a young beluga whale and making eye contact is another one
of these sections where I found myself delighted by the images Pinkney's words
convey.

"Little
Wapameg gets close enough to brush the side of our canoe. Then the whale rolls
slightly sideways so that one eye breaks the surface and looks up. Right up at
me!

Little
Wapameg's eye is big, wet and round. The colour is a deep gray, nearly black,
shimmering like a mirror and bottomless too. The eye shines like a polished
carving stone. I feel Little Wapameg look at me and it's as if we are sharing
all the wonder from inside both of us. I feel still and calm. "

Darlene
Gait's illustrations capture the essence of this story, enhance the magic of
the beautiful text and transport readers into the the boy's world and his way of living in it.

I
can't wait to hear what my young book club members have to say about it.

About Me

Across my teaching career I have taught combinations of mixed age groupings from kindergarten to grade 5. I was an ESL teacher for a number of years and am now a teacher librarian at Charles Dickens Elementary School in Vancouver, B.C.